I’ve always appreciated the thinking behind this idea –it’s Joseph Campbell’s concept of following our bliss step by step rather than trying to map it out in a five-year plan.

Unfortunately in the last half-dozen years, I’ve ignored the sage advice of Campbell and others and I have turned a blind eye to almost everything that interests me. Six professional books, two adolescent literacy programs, and an intense travel schedule have meant that I have been impersonating the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, muttering “I’m late, I’m late” as I speed through life while staring at my calendar.

While I’m still writing and speaking (and happy to be doing both), I decided last week that it’s time to turn over a new leaf in the “following your bliss” category and I’m so glad I did. If I hadn’t, I would never have opened the links in the email I received from my friend Freda, and I would have missed learning about something that is doing a great job of capturing my attention and also giving me ideas for future work.

Freda’s son, Lucas, is keenly interested in, and knowledgeable about, transmedia (aka cross-platform storytelling). He blogs about his interests at Silverstring Media, a company “committed to exploring the power of stories…in whatever way best serves the narrative and engages the audience, regardless of media or platform.”

While the word ‘transmedia’ had me cringing a bit with memories of other graduate school terminology, I was hooked by Lucas’s focus on the power of story and, since I know him to be a brilliant and creative young man, I spent a couple of pleasurable hours reading his posts and following links.

If I have captured your attention, here are some differentiated starting points based on your interests and readiness:
If you’ve never seen an example of the art form, try The Time Tribe (a video teaser), Azrael’s Stop (a story for adults), or Inanimate Alice (four episodes, with teaching material).
If you are interested in the possibilities of transmedia in education, check out this virtual roundtable.
If you would like to offer input to a resource guide Lucas is hoping to write for teachers, see Lucas’s March 6th blog “Blueprint for a Transmedia Classroom” or join the twitter group at hashtag #tmlearn.

While I am genuinely interested in transmedia and its’ role in education, I have referenced Lucas’s work for an additional reason. I knew Lucas when he was in grades 4 through 8. Reflecting on the interests he had then and the work he is doing now, I see someone who has stayed curious about the world, who is aware of his own strengths, and who has bravely set out to do the work that captures his attention. It seems to me that helping ourselves and others find and follow their bliss is perhaps a significant need in our society and the highest purpose of 21st century educators. What do you think?

I worked with the S.M.U.S. staff for the first time in January. We talked about instruction and assessment as it applies to 21st century teaching and learning. The day after the workshop, several teachers were asked to speak on camera about what they had gained from the day. Before watching you might like to predict what you will hear. If you were asked what really matters to effective teaching and learning in the 21st century, or what a professional learning day on any topic does for you, what would you say?

“At the end of this lesson….”

Add this statement to the beginning of a goal and see whether or not the goal still makes sense. Anne Reeves gives a poor example –“At the end of this lesson students will take notes from a PowerPoint lecture” and a good one –“At the end of this lesson, students will explain how five or more local businesses have come into existence as a result of urbanization.”

“Hey Dad”

Imagine your students going home and saying, “Hey Dad (Mom/Uncle Joe…) watch me (or listen to me)….” What aspects of learning would a successful student be able to show off? This is a good test for catching vague terms and making sure you are identifying the kind of thinking you expect students to do. For example, “Hey Dad, listen to me understand the importance of the periodic table” isn’t as helpful as “Hey Dad, listen to me explain the importance of the periodic table.”

Whaddya Know

Ask yourself if students need meaningful knowledge of the subject matter in order to achieve the goal. If they don’t, the statement may be an activity. For example, “Students will explore the local art gallery in an upcoming field trip” is an activity statement; it does not specify learning.

Students Reflect

Put yourself in your students’ place and imagine reflecting on the goal statement at the end of class. Are you able to state specifically what you have learned and what you are still having difficulty with?

- Focus on what is to be learned today, not over the next several weeks. If a lesson is going to extend over several days, try to determine the learning focus for each day and make that your goal statement.

- Explain the learning in the goal statement, not the assignment or activity. Just because students complete an activity, that doesn’t necessarily mean they learned anything. Be careful if you are including the task as well as the learning in the goal statement –many students will pay more attention to the task than to what they are expected to learn.

- Use verbs to indicate the kind of thinking students will be expected to do. Words like ‘summarize’, ‘evaluate’, and ‘identify’ are much better than ‘understand’, ‘learn’, or ‘know’.

- Write the goal so that successful achievement of it requires grade-level work. If students can achieve without working at grade level, they aren’t being given the opportunity to work to high expectations and you can’t use the results of their work in your evaluations.

- Visualize what a successful learner will be able to do as a result of achieving the goal (success criteria) and think about how your students might demonstrate this criteria. Good goals are assessable!

Coming next week: 4 Tests to Determine Goal Quality

1. Human behaviour is goal-directed. When students attend to a clearly written goal and the information that supports its’ achievement, that information moves into working memory. When there isn’t a clear goal, students aren’t sure what they should be attending to and without attention there’s no way to store and process information.

2. Goals don’t just make initial learning easier. Because students are working with focus and purpose, they are also able to more readily transfer knowledge to familiar and unfamiliar situations both within and beyond the provided subject area.

3. When you know exactly what you want students to know, understand and be able to do, you will know what successful achievement looks like. That knowledge makes both differentiation and assessment very easy to do. If, on the other hand, you start with an activity and then try to differentiate or assess it without a clear goal, chances are good that the work will not be aligned with the most salient features of the learning.

4. Clear goals help students to develop the metacognitive awareness that is necessary for both critical and creative thought. This is because a good goal is focused on learning, rather than an assignment.

5. Feedback is considered one of the most effective ways of improving student performance. Good feedback has three stages: telling students what they are doing well relative to the learning goal; telling students what they need to improve relative to the learning goal, and using a combination of pressure and support so that students persist until success has been achieved. Feedback loses its potency when there is no learning goal.

6. Goals keep teachers focused on student thinking rather than student activity. I’ll say more about this in subsequent posts.

Coming next week –5 Key Principles of Effective Learning Goals

I confess to being a bit of a connoisseur when it comes to these supplies; I’m quite prepared to pay more to get index cards that look marbled and sticky notes in interesting shapes and bright colours. However, if I were still teaching in a classroom, I would be making regular visits to my local dollar store to stock up on large quantities of a variety of basic supplies that make a difference to student learning.

Here’s what I’d buy and why:

Highlighters

A single colour of highlighter can be used by students while they read to isolate specifics such as words they don’t understand, support for inferences, or answers to questions. A variety of coloured highlighters can be used after reading to focus on and identify different structural elements of a text. Colour coding helps the brain to quickly identify different categories of information in a text, making highlighting useful for visual learners of all ages. It’s even recommended for law students learning to write briefs. The easiest highlighter colours to see are yellow, orange, and pink. Alternatively, you can provide students with various colours of highlighter tape, which has the benefits of being easily removable so as not to permanently mark textbooks, and reusable.

Sticky Notes

The more actively involved students are in processing information, the better. For that reason, sticky notes are one of the best resources teachers can provide. Students can use them to flag places in a text where their comprehension breaks down; mark parts of a text they’d like to talk about, or to record thoughts they want to contribute to a mind map or brainstorming session. Sticky notes can be used for a variety of assessment tasks, to support students with special needs, or for art, although this last one applies only when students have a lot of spare time and you have hundreds of dollars to spend on notes.

Index Cards

Small, recipe-sized index cards are useful whenever you want students to submit information that you need to sort. Because the index cards are stiffer than normal paper, they are easier to sort into groups when, for example, students give you an exit card summarizing their understanding of a concept. Index cards are also great for research purposes—as students research, they can record the citation information on one side of the card and quotations or interesting ideas from the text on the other side. If a card is used for each idea, the cards can then be sequenced to create an outline for the essay or research paper. And finally, for a bit of creative levity, check out this list of ten ways to cram a lot of information onto a card when you allow students to bring a single index card into a test situation.

Individual Whiteboards

You can purchase individual whiteboards from a dollar store or make your own by cutting up large sheets of melamine. Students can use old socks as whiteboard erasers and as holders for dry erase markers. Teachers have found dozens of uses for individual whiteboards, from developing the skills of students in language classes to teaching algebra in secondary math classrooms. Whiteboards keep students actively involved in learning, and provide teachers with immediate feedback on student understanding of the concepts we teach.

Regardless of the school supply you choose, and whether you use it in tangible or virtual form, highlighters, sticky notes, index cards, and individual whiteboards support active involvement by the diverse learners in our classrooms.